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The company overseeing plans to build the UK’s first nuclear waste repository was repeatedly targeted by cyber hackers last year, the body’s chief executive has admitted.
Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) is the entity behind the Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) initiative – a facility costing up to £53bn that will see the UK’s nuclear waste buried deep underground for long-term storage.
In 2022, the body was merged with two other nuclear bodies to form Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) in a shake-up designed to improve the efficiency of the UK’s management of its nuclear waste.
In a filing with Companies House late last year, its chief executive Corhyn Parr said the body had faced repeated cyber attacks in the 2022-23 financial year, although they did not have a “material effect” on its day-to-day operations.
“We have seen instances of potential exploitation of ownership change through specific attack vectors, predominantly Linkedin Targeting. The potential for increased cyber hostility towards the UK because of the conflict in Ukraine is still acknowledged,” she said.
The body has been particularly vigilant in trying to mitigate efforts to disrupt Development Consent Orders around the GDF, which are needed before construction on the project can begin.
The cyber attacks have been inflicting “reputational damage” through “social engineering, fake news, attempts to gain information around community partnerships, online activism and staff safety,” Parr said.
Construction on the GDF has not been approved yet and a public vote on the plans may not take place until 2027. A former gas terminal in Theddlethorpe, near Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, was announced as a possible location for the facility in 2021.
It will see nuclear waste from the UK being stored underneath up to 1,000m of solid rock until its radioactivity has naturally decayed. The latest planning assumption is that it will not be ready to receive intermediate-level waste until the 2050s, with high-level waste and spent fuel from 2075. Plans to fill the GDF with waste and then closing it once full will run into the next century.
Estimates suggest 5.1 million tonnes of radioactive waste will be produced over the next 100 years in the UK – this is made up of low-level waste (94 per cent), intermediate-level waste (6 per cent) and high-level waste (0.1 per cent).
“The company’s resilience to cyber threats has been maintained, with further improvements being made to increase cyber resilience over the next 12 months,” Parr said in the filing.
She said that transitioning IT systems over to Microsoft hosting and away from infrastructure on site has helped to dramatically improve its defences. But there are still “issues” with wider business continuity with regards to back-up regimes and general recovery that are not specific to cyber.
The Guardian recently claimed that senior staff at the Sellafield nuclear plant had “consistently covered up” evidence that its computer systems had been compromised – with the first breaches detected as far back as 2015.
